Saturday, December 25, 2010

The 2011 Computer Technology Preview...!

Not surprisingly, the PC ethos we all embrace—nonlinear, flexible, interconnected, and constantly evolving—lies at the center of the crossover. We mean that literally and figuratively. Desktops. Laptops. Tablets. Smartphones. Accelerated Processing Units. 60GHz networks. Personal servers. These days, each of us is essentially walking around with a tiny supercomputer, Internet, and cloud-computing scheme in our hands. To which we say, “Bring it on.” We’ve been waiting for this moment for years.

As always, the near future of PC technology is coalescing around three key axes: performance, power, and interconnectivity. Back in the day, you could sacrifice one or maybe even two of these criteria. Not anymore. Over the next 10 pages, we’re going to explain what, why, when, where, and howCPUs 2011 will bring a true battle royal for CPU supremacy. Here's an early scouting report

Yeah, we know: Everyone is hyper-excited about netbooks, tablets, smartphones, phablets, and blah blah blah. We couldn’t care less about that noise, because in 2011, we’re going to see an epic battle between AMD’s new CPU, code-named Bulldozer, and Intel’s Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge E procs.

We know that Bulldozer will be a significant update for AMD and is considered the company’s first all-out “new” chip since the original Athlon was introduced. The major change is the adoption of a new dual-chip “module” approach. Typical CPU cores are stand-alone affairs, isolated islands. If core 1 is busy on a single-threaded application and core 2 is twiddling its thumbs, core 1 won’t be able to access core 2’s resources. With Bulldozer’s dual-core modules, CPU core resources that aren’t being utilized can be thrown at the single-threaded application core 1 is working on, thereby increasing performance.